


Everything In Its Place

by Framlingem



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 11:36:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Framlingem/pseuds/Framlingem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some things just belong where they belong, and that's all there is to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything In Its Place

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HopefulNebula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HopefulNebula/gifts).



Leena had always been a collector of the weird and wonderful. Or, as her mother put it, "so much _junk_ , child, you're the only person I know who collects empty soda cans, oh, well, at least you keep everything tidy and dusted."

It was only one soda can, anyway. Leena had found it in the park, glinting at her from under a bench. t had rolled there after a young man had dropped it in terror when he realized that the stroller he'd turned his back on for "just a second, god, it was just a second" was gone. 

Leena didn't actually like the soda can. She'd put it next to her favourite teddy bear, just for a second, and then she couldn't find the bear.

Nobody had seen where the stroller went, and nobody knew where her bear was.

The soda can went on a high shelf, next to an old map of Yosemite she'd unearthed at a garage sale and paid a nickel for, and nothing else went missing. Years later, with more resources available to her than the newspapers she'd had to read in secret at the library ("You shouldn't worry about such things, Leena, you're only a child!"), she looked up the man without a stroller and discovered that his daughter never had been found. 

She drove past his house - the same house where he'd been waiting all those years, with a hopeful sign in the window saying "You're always welcome, Amy" next to the picture of a dark-eyed toddler - and he was home. SHe could see the light of him through the walls, surrounded by the rest of his family, all patched oranges and reds, with a thread of bilious yellow showing in the seams.

On a different shelf, in her college dorm room, she had a harmonica the guy at the pawn shop had thought was worthless. She'd been rummaging through a box of them on a hunch, and when she held this one up to the light it had positively _shone_. She'd closed her fist around it, taken it up to the front and said "this one, please", and the guy had told her "two dollars" before sheepishly returning her beaming smile and throwing in a case for an extra fifty cents. 

He'd been lavender, edged around with gunmetal grey.

She'd played the harmonica once, and only once, at the student bar's open mic night. She'd never held an audience like that in her life before. The bar was almost eerily silent except for her blown chords, the students' eyes almost eerily wide. Even the bartender had stoped halfway through pouring a drink. It was sublime, until someone came in the door without stopping to listen, took in the drinks menu, and said incredulously, "You want HOW much for a beer?!"

Pandemonium.  
"You know what, he's right!"  
"It's fifty cents cheaper at my uncle's place, and he's got better beer, too!"  
"This is extortion!"  
"You bar owners think that you can all get together and rig the prices, just because there aren't any choices in this town!"  
"We should do something about it!"  
"Yeah!"

They'd gotten as far as tearing down some posters from the wall and writing protest slogans ("Finks out of Drinks!" "Beers Without Fear!") on the backs when Leena, frantic and acting on instinct, blew a long, discordant blast of sound. Everyone turned to look at her, stunned and confused.  
"Hey, everyone," she said a trifle desperately, mentally recalculating her budget for the next month, "this round's on me."

More pandemonium, but much more agreeable this time.

When she made it home, the instrument went back on the shelf, in its case, the battered leather hiding the initials "B.D." scratchd into the bottom. It was next to a guitar pick signed "J.B.", and seemed to like it there. There were a lot of hangovers the next day among a certain group of students. Leena stayed away from the bar for a while and picked up some extra shifts at work.

Leena loved her work. She manned ("Wommannnnnned!" her boss always chimed in) the front desk at the local backpacker's inn, along with cooking the occasional meal whenever the regulars and passers-through pooled together to buy ingredients for her according to the lists she posted on the dining room wall. She'd discovered some time ago that she liked to cook, and that she was good at it, particularly comfort food for groups of people she cared about, and the travellers who came through "her" kitchen were generally people she cared about. After a few months, news had spread a little through the grapevine, and backpackers had started asking about how to get in on one of her meals. It was nice, making people feel at home. 

The inn had what her boss jokingly referred to as "the museum", an industrial shelving unit filled with oddities their guests either brought as gifts or forgot to take with them when they left: foreign currency tacked to the backboard; a small metallic plastic moose with a Canadian penny embedded in its back ("Isn't it hideous?" the guest had crowed gleefully. "I'm giving one to everybody."); a sock with the three lions of the England's soccer ("Football!" chorussed the guests) team embroidered on the cuff; a t-shirt reading "In Austria, there are NO kangaroos!". Leena had been working there for two years and was making good progress towards her degrees in Psychology and History when she made her first addition to the museum.

This one, she'd found at a flea market. She'd felt the pull of it from all the way across the square and had barely seen any of the other trinkets and gewgaws she'd beelined past as she made her way to a stall surrounded by teenagers and selling what looked to be vintage army gear. On a hook at the back was a backpack, an old one, beat-up and unremarkable to anyone who didn't see it properly. The woman running the cash register (lemon, with a hint of pink) sold it to her for seven dollars. Its canvas was still sturdy enough, the leather straps worn but perfectly serviceable, the buckles only slightly tarnished. Embroidered on a tape sewn to the inside pocket, Leena discovered the name R. Shirrmann.

It wanted to go back to the inn, so that was where Leena took it, and the rucksack took up residence at the left-hand side of the topmost shelf of the museum.

The inn had a marked uptick in the number of school groups that stayed with them after that. It was great in terms of revenue, but they always left a mess in the kitchen.

That top shelf gradually became Leena's Shelf, an eclectic display of locally-found items on a travelling theme, strictly curated so that they didn't disagree with each other. She'd placed a small, hand-lettered sign on the shelf asking people not to touch, and for the most part, they abided by it.

For the most part. One day, while she was finishing up some paperwork for him, a young Italian man wandered over to examine the items while he was waiting for his key and bed assignment. He reached up and picked up an old coin she'd traded for with a homeless man (bright, shining gold) who'd thought that a solid pair of boots and the promise of the inn's address and shower to use for job application and interview purposes was a good deal (she meant to give him back the coin as a present once he was back on his feet). The young man - Nico, it said on his passport - fiddled with it for a moment, touching something hanging around his neck and muttering something under his breath, and vanished in front of her eyes.

She blinked.

Still gone. He was still gone, and there was his backpack on the ground by the desk, and she still had his passport. She gave him an hour to reappear, and then called the police to say that one of her guests, a foreign national with not a lot of English, had disappeared while she wasn't looking, abandoning his belongings, and no, he wasn't upstairs, he'd have needed a key to get to the stairwell. 

The coin was on the ground where he'd been standing. She went to pick it up, then, feeling cautious, put on a pair of the disposable latex gloves she used for cleaning the bathrooms first. When she did pick it off the floor, it felt somehow heavier than it had before, and felt heavier the closer it got to its place on the shelf. 

Heavy wasn't quite the right word for it. It resisted, with something she could only describe as an increased sense of wrongness, as though that wasn't where it belonged anymore.

On one of her news websites the next day, there was a "weird news!" story about a young, bewildered Italian man caught stowing away on a cargo ship in the Persian Gulf, without any papers or possessions other than the clothes he was wearing. She was not entirely surprised, therefore, when two people announcing themselves as federal agents came into the inn the next day and started eyeing the museum.

"Can I help you?" she asked the woman, who looked as though she normally stayed in four-star hotels at least, and yet looked more at home than her much scruffier companion, who was pacing nervously around the lobby, muttering. The woman smiled at her, and Leena took a step back. The woman was deep indigo, calm and shimmering, with orange lights - how odd, they were symbols - floating around inside her, and Leena felt as though if she looked any longer she might fall in, until a hand cupped her chin and the woman's voice said, "Yes. I know. It's all right."

The man had stopped pacing and was regarding her curiously. He was a mahogany brown. She liked it.

"I think," she managed, "You might be looking for this," and she drew the coin out of her pocket, still wrapped in its glove, and handed it over to the man, whose eyes widened when he unwrapped it.

"Gemelli Careri's St. Christopher medal," he breathed, and dropped it into a silver bag. Leena jumped a little at the shower of sparks it emitted, then relaxed as the feeling of wrongness that had been hovering over her subsided. "It helps you to travel in the same style as Careri did when you pray to St. Christopher in Italian... no wonder. We've been looking for this for years."

"And that," said the woman, eyeing Leena's Shelf, "is Richard Shirrmann's backpack, and I spy a few other interesting items as well."

"I have more at home, if you'd like to see them," said Leena. "There's this harmonica, and a soda can..."

They both stared at her and, uncomfortable, she reached under her counter for a plastic container. "Muffin?"

The man took one and bit into it, and then closed his eyes, chewing rapturously. "Oh, Mrs. Frederic," he said. "We have to keep her."

"I believe," said Mrs. Frederic, "that you're right."


End file.
